Music study skills session – using wikis

The eLearning Unit has been working with Freya Jarman from the School of Music who runs a study skills module in music. In this module students construct group a website for future first year students using the wiki tool within VITAL/Blackboard. Freya has presented this teaching approach at last year’s Learning and Teaching Conference. This year, the first years students are doing the same with some slight modifications, for instance, groups are now not self-selected, but aligned to the personal tutorial groups.

It is always a pleasure to see Freya’s dynamism when teaching, which I had a chance to do when helping her show students the functionality of the wiki tool.

Screenshot of Polleverywhere, the online and mobile phone voting tool; as you can see it is easy to embed the live voting results in Powerpoint slides.

It was the first time we used the Polleverywhere software in the PC lab, which allowed students to vote on the best wiki sites they looked at as well as entering free-text responses as feedback on the wiki sites. All this feedback was then displayed in a Powerpoint file live (please see the image above). As we were in a PC lab, we did not make use of the mobile phone voting option: students voted via the web – but other staff at the university are already making use of this feature in large lecture classes with great success.

We are always after case studies to show staff in our sessions. If you are using wikis for collaborative group work, please let us know via elearning@liv.ac.uk or contact one of the eLearning Unit team members, we would love to hear from you!